The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

There is a general sense that we never stop being in front of Zoom or interacting. It’s very taxing, to be honest. In the first large-scale analysis of digital communication early in the crisis, the team—Sadun; Jeffrey T. Polzer, the UPS Foundation Professor of Human Resource Management; HBS doctoral candidate Evan DeFilippis; New York University doctoral student Stephen Michael Impink; and former HBS research associate Madison Singell—studied aggregated, anonymous emails and meeting invitations of employees at 21,500 companies in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Shifting to remote work at the start of the pandemic stripped away whatever was left of the elusive 9-to-5 business day and replaced it with videoconferencing and “asynchronous work.” With at least 16 percent of Americans planning to keep working from home part of the time after COVID-19 abates, researchers are probing how virtual interaction might reshape organizations. “There is a general sense that we never st ... Read full article.